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A warm welcome back to a previous guest today. It's a real joy to be talking to  Professor Ellie Hothersall-Davis from the University of Dundee. We have come up with today six books which we think would be really, really good as reading material before starting a medical degree.

Maybe people listening who have got children or godchildren or nieces or nephews or next door neighbours who are planning to become doctors. Arguably actually perhaps becoming any sort of healthcare professional because I think the themes for all of these books are translatable across healthcare and Ellie and I wanted to think about what we could suggest to people to be reading that aren't textbooks that will give them enjoyment and escapism and help them to promote empathy, to think about things from another perspective, to lose themselves in a book whilst also being able to think more deeply about something they might never previously have considered. We've got six cracking books coming up today and I really hope that you are going to enjoy thinking about them.

The books we discussed:

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Cure for Good Intentions by Sophie Harrison
The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini

We also briefly mentioned the Beekeeper of Alleppo